Five Reasons You Aren’t Blogging Correctly

The Internet is overflowing with useful information. No matter what you blog about (unless its personal), I can almost guarantee you that there will be at least 10 different articles somewhere that are about the same thing.

It’s not easy getting your blog noticed today, considering all of the options for readers out there. That’s why your first impression is your most important, and will determine whether the reader will ever return.

Presentation in a blog post is one of the most important things. If you cannot organize your thoughts and ideas correctly, people will have a harder time reading and interpreting them.

1) You aren’t using headings and formatting.

Headings in posts are one of the most important things. They provide a way for content to be divided up into sections. It also gives readers an idea of what they are going to read. It’s almost like a table of contents.

Formatting can be used to make certain information stand out. If a post is all plain text, a user won’t be able to tell exactly which part is more important. Use bold text to make text stand out, but remember,

IF YOU MAKE EVERYTHING BOLD, NOTHING IS BOLD.— Art Webb

2) Line Heights – It ain’t rocket science.

A lot of blogs that I see tend to not believe in line height. Lines of text are piled on to each other, line after line after line, all in one big chunk of text. It makes me claustrophobic!

I suggest that line height be at least 1.5em or something like that (50% more than default). This gives your eyes a little space, and it allows your brain to rest for a second or two. It’s like reading those long classics with small letters that are all jammed together, it makes your intention span last for about 10 seconds.

3) Every idea needs a paragraph

I don’t care how short your idea is, if its one sentence, or five, it needs its own paragraph.

Paragraphs, just like line heights, allow your eyes to relax a little before starting to read again. It separates chunks of information into short, easy to read blocks. Would you rather read this blog post the way it is, or would you rather read it all in one paragraph? I thought so.

4) The ‘list’ icon is there for a reason, silly!

Lists are one of the best ways to organize text. Plus, all humans just love to read lists. Why do you think there are all those ‘Ten Best WordPress Plugins’ or ‘Top Twenty Artists’ or whatever. As Carl said in a recent post, if you didn’t like lists, you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

Another example, read the below two chunks of texts (Taken from the Advertise page.

This blog is #1 on Google for ‘Make Money Online,’ has 5400+ RSS feed subscribers daily, is highly influential and authoritative in the “Make money online” niche, is one of the Top 2000+ blog among 200 million world wide according to Technorati, and is the top 68,013 website according to Alexa.

or…

This blog is #1 on Google for ‘Make Money Online

5400+ RSS feed subscribers daily

Highly influential and authoritative in the “Make money online” niche

Top 2000+ blog among 200 million world wide according to Technorati

Top 68,013 website according to Alexa

Now, which was easier to read?

Should it be long or short?

Here’s the thing, why does it really matter? As long as your post is interesting to read, and gets the point across, then it could be 100 words, or 1000. As long as you use the above methods to organize your thoughts, it won’t really matter.

The problems however, are these:

If your post is short, it may be harder to get the amount of information that you want to. Your post may not be detailed enough, and be incomplete.

If your post is too long, then you may start repeating yourself. If you write a 5000 word essay, there’s a pretty good chance that you said the same thing in paragraph 7 as you did in 24. Also, I would rather read 200 words of information than 500 words of fluff. If you are going to give me fluff, then please, well, don’t.

So in the end, as long as you are giving details and information, and do not repeat yourself, it does not really matter. Just make sure that you post consistently. It’s better to post once every other day than post four times in one day, once two days later, and then not post for a week.

Well I think around 500 words will do good, but if you have longer ones, split them into 2 post. Like part one and part two. I agree with the size of the fronts and the paragraph, it will help the readers to continue finish reading the post.